


Climbed a mountain and I turned around

by another_Hero, talkedwithnoman



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Anxiety, F/F, Forest Fires, Found Family, Gen, I have done a lot of research but many firefighting details are going to be wrong anyway, PTSD, Questionable Coping Mechanisms, a recent divorce, and sometimes I ignored reality in favor of convenience, canon-typical alcohol choices, especially the daily life ones, it's not named that way but ptsd is pretty common among wildland firefighters, mt hood, processing bodily stress and trauma, sharp tools, stevie's terrible family, there's angst in here but there's hope too ok, wildland firefighting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:27:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26294875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/another_Hero/pseuds/another_Hero, https://archiveofourown.org/users/talkedwithnoman/pseuds/talkedwithnoman
Summary: Stevie’s in her rookie season as a wildland firefighter and processing what got her here. Ronnie’s aging out and processing what comes next.
Relationships: Ronnie Lee & Stevie Budd, Stevie Budd & Ronnie Lee
Comments: 28
Kudos: 26
Collections: Elevate! A Schitt's Creek Femslash Exchange





	Climbed a mountain and I turned around

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NeelyO](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeelyO/gifts).



> NeelyO, you prompted a bunch of fluffy things and also firefighting, and I am afraid you did not end up with a fluffy fic. I hope you still enjoy, but it seemed only decent to warn you lol. it is not as angsty as the tags make it sound tho. but also if forest fires are still Way Too Real, pls feel free to hold off and read later when they are only the normal amount Too Real.
> 
> thanks to various people for idea help 
> 
> title, of course, is from landslide 
> 
> thanks to RQ for the beta!

Stevie drove. Far. She’d packed everything into her car, which meant her sleeping bag and her $380 boots and not much else. Wasn’t like she had $380 to spare with a move coming up, but the training had told her exactly what boots to buy and why they were required, all leather and no steel toes, obviously, the soles both stitched and screwed so high temperatures couldn’t tear them off. And all the news and first-person accounts she’d read had stressed the importance of the boots, given the demands of the job, and when Jocelyn had given her Mutt’s phone number to ask questions, he had said, “I know they’re expensive, but you’re going to be glad for good boots. Job’s hard on your body. You get blisters on your feet, you’re just gonna make it harder. Or, y’know, give yourself an infection.” So the next time her mom had come to town, begging for money and a place to stay and something she wouldn’t have been able to call forgiveness, Stevie had stolen one of the six credit cards from her wallet and bought the boots. She was a little surprised the transaction went through, that her mom had the credit available, but she didn’t feel anything like guilt when she entered the number. Since they arrived, she’d worn them a few times, gone on hikes in them, to break them in. She’d never been much for hiking, had thought about it when she applied for the job, but her real problem was the purposelessness of it. Not like training, with times to beat, reps to count. Specific body parts to isolate and perfect, regardless of what your body thought it wanted. Hiking near her hometown, you went to that effort for what—a view, one someone had already brought you up here as a child and made you see.

She was out of there now, though, headed west. She’d never heard of Molalla, certainly never been there. She was able to have Jocelyn administer and sign off on the fitness exam from home, as the head of the local fire department. And since Jocelyn was of the opinion that Stevie needed to get the hell out of town, she was happy to oblige. She paid attention, on that phone call with Mutt, because looking at the town name,  _ Molalla _ , she wasn’t even sure how to pronounce it. It turned out her guess was right, or right enough. She’d looked it up a little. Small, but several times the size of the town she was leaving. It had a corporate grocery store. But it was still a place whose main street was the highway. And then she hadn’t looked it up much more. She’d be tired most of the time she was there, she reasoned.

But she had to get there first. She didn’t have all that many CDs in her car, and she was getting tired of the Clash, but the noise—when she stopped driving each night, she switched from music to forgettable TV—helped keep the feelings in the right order, the liberty ahead of the loneliness, when nobody recognized her in any of these gas stations, in any of these grocery stores she used instead of restaurants to save money, in any of these inevitable motels. She thought each night how she could sleep in the car or camp, save the cost, but she’d scraped up the money for proper beds and showers on her trip. She’d spend enough of the summer without them. So she checked into motels whose walls were a dull and brickless off-white, whose beds were doubles and queens, and she drank a bottle of wine, all of it, because of open container laws, she told herself, and relaxed in the knowledge that everywhere—even Nebraska, because at one point she was sleeping in Nebraska—was better than where she’d grown up.

She got to Oregon a day earlier than expected—she’d underestimated how long having nothing to stop for would keep her driving. Mutt was letting her crash at his house for the summer. “Probably neither one of us will spend that much time there anyway,” he’d said. They’d technically grown up in the same town, had even overlapped by a few months in the volunteer fire department before Mutt picked up and left, and it was a small enough place that meant she could name all the girlfriends and the one and a half boyfriends he’d had before he left town. But neither of them was the kind of person to instigate a friendship, so they didn’t have one. His mom had probably made him offer his couch, but Stevie had never been above accepting Jocelyn-mandated charity before, and it didn’t seem realistic to develop a problem with it now.

She’d sent him a text last night, when she realized she’d definitely make it today, and that was all fine. She texted him an ETA around noon, when she pulled off of I-84 for a dollar hamburger from McDonald’s. Then she got back on the road and drove into mountains, which came to be covered in forest—conifers so thick it was hard to imagine light getting down between them. It wasn’t like anything she’d seen in that whole trip across the country, she thought, the thickness and the darkness of them. She also thought, of course their forest fires spread.

Her first day at the Forest Service site, when she went in for her onboarding, she met a lot of dudes while they stood around waiting for things to start. Their names ran together: Jake Antonio Emir Ken Patrick Gary Dane Ted. She’d know them all soon, she was sure. There were twenty people on the crew, and the only other woman was named Ronnie, and she had the constant eye-roll of an old-timer. “So,” she said when she met Stevie, “you’re a rookie.”

“Yep.”

Ronnie didn’t have anything to say about that, it seemed. Maybe she was trying to intimidate her, but Stevie had been a stoner kid in high school; she was impervious to older women who tried to rule by fear. And older women who tried to direct your behavior with kindness, actually. Anyway, then Bob was calling them in to sign papers. It was the kind of dangerous job where you had to name not just an emergency contact but next of kin. She put Aunt Maureen for both, mechanically, the only family she had, even though Aunt Maureen seemed to be doing fine in Florida and even though Aunt Maureen had acted like Stevie leaving nine dollars an hour at the motel was a personal betrayal.  _ Everything I’ve done for you _ had been invoked, like Stevie being fed as a child left her with a lifelong debt. She’d just have to not die, Stevie thought, and then she wouldn’t leave Aunt Maureen any money. 

After some videos about safety, the issuing of bags for their gear, and a handful of training reminders, it turned out Stevie was parked next to Ronnie, who leaned against her car, arms crossed, and sized Stevie up. “I haven’t seen you in town,” she said. “Where do you live?”

“Um, well, I’m crashing at Mutt’s for the season.”

Ronnie frowned. “You’re with Mutt?”

“Not  _ with. _ Just, he’s from my hometown, so.”

“Mm. Well, he hasn’t said a lot about it.”

“I don’t blame him,” Stevie said pointedly.

“All right, all right. Welcome, then. Don’t let any of them mess with you.” She glanced around the parking lot at the guys.

“Is that likely?”

Ronnie tilted her head. “They’re okay guys, mostly,” she said. “And the job’s too tiring to get up to anything serious. But if they give you shit, you give it back.”

“My only skill.” Stevie got into her car then. The whole point of having a car was that you could leave when you wanted to. Ronnie watched her a moment. Stevie didn’t wait to see how long.

The first time Stevie got called out for a fire, she was lying on the couch in Mutt’s always-empty house, shorts pulled hastily up and suction vibe not yet cleaned. They’d been told the season was a go, told to be ready to leave within an hour. She laughed when the phone rang; then she got nervous. She washed the toy and dressed hastily, in the cotton and Nomex and boots she kept in a stack by the couch. Grabbed her red personal gear bag, which she’d prepared the day it was issued, and her half-eaten box of Cheez-Its. She’d fought fires before. So they weren’t forest fires, but if Mutt could handle this, she was sure, she could too. Anyway, it was a bad look to be the rookie and the person everybody was waiting for; she drove up to the ranger station.

From there, their two huge vans had to drive a couple hours into the mountains. Stevie seemed to be the only nervous one; the mood was high, like they were a sports team from a movie on their way out to a game they felt sure to win. Patrick sat next to her, and Stevie made sure to sit still, casual, not pick at the skin on her fingers. Patrick had an actual paper map, and he told her they were driving onto Mt. Hood, pointed at the spot where the fire was. A kid had called this one in, Bob had informed them, after setting off some fireworks, and everyone had rolled their eyes. Stevie had enough firefighting experience to disapprove of teenagers with fireworks; she guessed she wasn’t the only one here for whom that meant disapproving of her former self.

She smelled the smoke before she saw anything. They arrived to a slipshod city; a guy named Ray showed them to the sleeping area. Everyone else took their tents out of their bags and set them up, so Stevie did too. She pitched her tent by Ronnie’s, out of self-preserving instinct; surely none of the guys here would mess with her. She checked her phone for service, saw there was none, turned it off, and stuffed it in her bag, which she stuffed in her tent. For the next few months, she could already tell, everything she owned was going to smell like burning trees.

There was a canopy set up where they got their instructions and their sack lunches; they ate while Bob briefed them on the day. Stevie listened, and most of it was familiar from her training, but some of it was circuitous and confusing Bob-speak, and some was only going to make sense once she got out to the line and saw what everyone else was doing. She’d copy until she actually knew. She hardly noticed the sandwiches as she ate them; she was too busy watching everyone else understand the instructions.

They drove until they stopped and walked to a river. When possible, firelines were dug from water or outcroppings of rock so the hike off of them would lead somewhere the fire couldn’t follow. Stevie hung by Ronnie as long as she could, mostly because Ronnie had the kind of energy like if Stevie was doing everything wrong, she’d tell her. But there wasn’t too much to get wrong; once Bob had given them their escape route and instructions, all they were doing was taking the forest down to mineral soil, and Stevie and Ronnie were at different places in the line.

Ronnie was at the head of the crew with a chainsaw to clear saplings, logs, hanging branches, anything heavy, and Jake, behind her, tossed them into or out of the fire as casually as he seemed to do everything—casual, but impressively fast. Antonio had a backpack pump to knock down the flames so they could all work right beside the fire. Then Stevie and the rest of them came through with pulaskis and rakes to move the ground cover and dead roots, tossing the forest floor out of the way. An intentional destruction; sometimes you had to clear the life out of a place to protect it, to make sure the fire couldn’t reach the rest of you, Stevie understood that. The work was hard, which meant she was strong. The acrid air was difficult, but it made her aware of herself: the scraping in her lungs was a sign that she was in her body and her body was here. The ground shifted as roots left it, and everyone was working with heavy sharp tools, and Stevie had to pay constant attention to the dangers of her surroundings, but that was nothing new for her. She hacked and dug until Bob called them to hike off the line and she realized she was starving and she realized, in how far it was back to the van, how much progress they had made in one day. Back at the camp they ate—not institutional, cold food like the lunch, there was fucking steak here—and Ronnie sat beside her and said, “You did pretty good, for a new kid.”

Stevie kind of doubted whether Ronnie had actually noticed her; maybe just keeping up with the crew was enough to qualify as  _ doing good _ . They didn’t know each other well enough for Stevie to give the obvious retort, some shit about Ronnie’s age and who would recover faster. Anyway, she was going to be sore as hell tomorrow and doing this again.

A lot of this crew had worked together last summer, some of them longer. The closeness came through on the line, in the way they communicated with their faces and hands, the way a shout of “Take more” or “Take less” from Mutt at the back would make the others subtly shift how they worked. She was learning the calls and responses of a wildland crew. But they knew each other’s lives, too. Patrick, in particular, remembered details and asked after Ted’s daughter, Jake’s business. At dinner he said to Ronnie, “How’s Karen doing?”

Ronnie’s grimace was not the usual one she seemed always to fix Patrick with; it was more withdrawn. “Fine,” she said. “I assume.”

Patrick seemed to know better than to follow up, but Jake, who never had any compunction about anything, said, “Something happen?”

“Yeah,” Ronnie drawled, “she divorced me, is what happened.”

“I’m so sorry,” Patrick said, “I didn’t—” She silenced him with a hand.

“That sucks, dude,” said Jake. “I mean, unless it doesn’t.”

“No,” Ronnie agreed, “it sucks.” 

On the line the next morning, she worked the soreness out. She was determined to keep up; plenty of people here were bent over, hacking into the ground, and at least here she knew what she was doing it for. Work at the motel had never given her that. She stood by Ted and matched him stroke for stroke. She would not be the new girl. 

Each day, they made it to the fireline by 0800, and while the schedule said 12 hours a day from the start of the briefing, she’d known to expect more. Six hours of sleep was a good night. The taste of smoke in the air and the scratch of smoke in her lungs were constant, and the fire noise never subsided, a rolling, fricative sound like a storm. The adrenaline carried her, that and the granola bars she’d stuck in every pocket.

Until it didn’t. On the fifth day, she woke up just tired. She’d seen some of her crewmates slump the last couple days, shuffle and yawn until they made it to the line, then keep going. Stevie had handled plenty of things in her life by just lasting until they were over, she reminded herself. She would not be the new girl. She shuffled and yawned until she made it to the line, then kept going.

But during mop-up that day, she had a log to move—Bob had pointed it out to her, said it looked likely to roll downhill and could compromise the fireline—and look, she should have been able to, she knew that. But the log was heavy, and her body was tired, and she just couldn’t get a hold on it. Any way she touched it, it felt about to roll. She couldn’t let any of the guys help her with this. It’d make her look like she couldn’t keep up.

But it wasn’t one of the guys who tried to help her. “Hey,” said Ronnie. “This looks like a two-person job.”

“I don’t think it’s supposed to be.”

Ronnie didn’t answer that. “You get that end,” she said. And they lifted it together to a place Ronnie indicated, where the angle of the ground changed a little in their favor, and they set it down.

“Thanks,” Stevie muttered, embarrassed. “You shouldn’t have had to do that.” 

“Oh, shut up, Rookie,” Ronnie said. “We’re trying to stop a fire.”

All the guys cleared out when they got back to town. They had people to see (Patrick, Ted), alone time to arrange (Mutt, who apparently had been so absent from his house because he had a whole—barn?—where he stayed when he needed to get away), gear to carefully and precisely re-pack (Ken), summer life in Oregon to take advantage of (Jake, also Ken). Stevie didn’t know what all the rest of them did; these were the guys who hung around Ronnie the most, and therefore they were the ones Stevie found herself next to.

“You don’t have plans?” Ronnie asked, when she saw Stevie checking her phone by her car instead of driving right off.

“I don’t know anybody here.”

“Come for dinner tomorrow,” Ronnie said. 

“ _You_ don’t have plans?”

Ronnie gave her a look that meant _obviously_. “Drinks at six, dinner at seven. I’ll text you the address.”

Stevie showered in Mutt’s house and ate three granola bars and slept until the middle of the morning. She couldn’t sleep any longer, but she lay around in bed until she got so suddenly, absolutely hungry that she had to get up. She wasn’t much of a cook, and if they were back out in a couple of days, she didn’t want anything to go bad, so she went to the Safeway in her pajamas and bought Chinese food, jojos, a donut, more Cheez-Its, more granola bars, three bags of beef jerky, a bottle of wine for Ronnie’s tonight, and a bag of M&Ms for the next slump day. She ate the donut while she shopped, the way her mom had let her each time she’d decided she was going to be home and responsible and had taken Stevie to Elmdale for a big grocery trip. It usually only lasted a couple weeks, but Stevie had enjoyed the donuts. Like her mom had, she told the cashier, “Also I had a donut. Chocolate, if it matters.” Held up the bit of waxed paper like proof. Once she was back at Mutt’s, she sat at his very nice table and ate the jojos and a good amount of the Chinese food and watched Wynonna Earp for five hours. Then she changed out of her pajama T-shirt into a non-pajama T-shirt and walked to Ronnie’s.

“Come in,” Ronnie said, as casual as if they were friends. Stevie handed her the bottle of wine; Ronnie poured her a glass of something that was already breathing. If the whole crew got together, Stevie imagined, it would be beer, grilled meat. But it seemed perfectly ordinary, here in Ronnie’s small house with all the windows and the glass door open, to drink wine and watch her cover puff pastry with tomatoes and slide it into the oven. Stevie knew she ought to offer to help, but she didn’t know how to do anything in a kitchen.

Ronnie pinched some rosemary off a plant in her windowsill. “I’m impressed you can grow anything,” Stevie said, “when you’re in and out of town like this.”

“Not much,” Ronnie said. “Rosemary doesn’t need to be watered too often. Been thinking I’ll garden next year.”

“You’re not going to be on a crew next summer?”

Ronnie shook her head. “I’m aging out,” she said. “And honestly, I should have quit years ago. Work’s hard on your body.” She took a sip of wine. “And it’s hard on your brain.”

Stevie didn’t feel that yet, but she could imagine how years of firelines might instill the kind of vigilance that would be hard to shake when you got back on solid ground. She nodded.

“There are other jobs in fire, you know, but.” She shook her head. “I don’t need to fuck up my knees any more than I have already.”

“What do you do in the off season?” It was the kind of small-talk topic that had come up with some of the others: Jake built furniture, Ted cared for his kid.

Ronnie made a sour face, but before Stevie could walk back the question, she said, “We’ll see.” Then she said, “What about you, you going home in the fall?” And Stevie understood Ronnie’s reaction.

“I don’t have plans,” she said, “but no, no, I’m not.”

And Ronnie got that. She didn’t ask anything else about it. “Anything you want to see this summer?” she said instead. “You’re not from out here, right?”

“I haven’t done a lot of research,” Stevie said honestly.

“Well,” Ronnie said, “we’ve got it all. Mountains. Ocean. River. Do you windsurf?” Absolutely fucking not. Ronnie smirked. “Wineries,” she said, clearly aware that this was a little nearer the mark. “You need any recommendations, you just ask.”

The puff pastry thing was delicious. There was also a bean thing, a potato thing, a green salad. “So, like, you cook,” Stevie said.

“I mean, I buy frozen dough and vegetables and cheese.”

“But you know what to do with them,” Stevie said. “You cook well enough to invite someone over for dinner.”

Ronnie nodded a little. “I used to have a wife,” she said, like it was an explanation.

Stevie didn’t know exactly what to do with that information. “So, what, you had to cook?”

“So I wanted to.”

Stevie wasn’t sure she got it, but they weren’t— _friends_ , exactly. Personal questions felt like prying. “Well,” she said, “I never had a wife, so when I’m left to my own devices it’s possible I’ll spend the summer eating takeout from Safeway, so this is very impressive to me.” 

And Ronnie made a face, a big, “Oh, God,” and proceeded to tell her where in town she could get a worthwhile dinner. “But the jojos, Ronnie,” Stevie said, “I didn’t know you could get those outside of school lunches,”x and then Ronnie was shaking her head, laughing at the folly of youth, and they were on the same team. There wasn’t anybody to ask Stevie if she was making friends on the crew, and all this wasn’t _friends_ , but it counted. If she needed somebody to help her, Ronnie might.

Their next fire was a short trip, 24 hours that turned into 36, and after that they were out on another 2-week roll. She brought the bag of M&Ms for her slump; it didn’t help much. But though the adrenaline was weaker than her first time, her energy a little lower from the earlier work, the camaraderie was more robust. She’d worked with these people for a couple weeks and made it out alive; she knew a little better what they wanted from her. When Emir said, “You’re really getting the hang of this,” she thought she might make it to the end of the summer.

It was the first time she’d imagined it, she realized then. Not that she’d expected to die in a dramatic firefighting accident, but like—she hadn’t expected to make it through, either. Her arms ached from the repetitive motion, her back and thighs and knees from the bending, her calves from how far they walked and how heavily, she was always thirsty, and the structural firefighting in her hometown certainly hadn’t prepared her for the constant effort. But still, she might be able to keep at it.

Two weeks out meant 48 hours resting, a requirement. It was the only time they weren’t on call, didn’t have to be nearby, and she’d realized the first time how few of them actually rested. All of them with kids had no chance, of course, but Patrick had a boyfriend on the coast, and he just showered and drove the two hours out there. Antonio had some errands to run, some work that wasn’t fighting fires that still mattered to him and that he was, of course, behind on. Ivan woke up at 0530 every day whether they were on a line or not. Dane road-tripped into the mountains with his bros. This time, a bunch of them were planning a party while they had time to sleep off the hangover.

She was going, obviously. These were the only people she knew here. Ronnie rolled her eyes at the idea, and Stevie wasn’t that surprised. Most of the crew was a good ten years younger than Ronnie, and while it wasn’t particularly a problem on the line, it would probably be isolating at a house party. It didn’t matter, Stevie figured; Ronnie lived here year-round, probably knew plenty of people. Stevie would go wherever there was free booze.

And it was fine, the party. She did shots with Emir and Gary and didn’t hook up with either of them, so honestly, she was doing an excellent job of confining her most self-destructive impulses. The person she did hook up with, Tennessee, was a total stranger, a friend of Mutt’s—not a date of Mutt’s, Stevie hoped, but she only hoped it because she still had to work with the guy and she liked having a free place to sleep. Emir walked her home, and it was only about two blocks. It was all so easy, having a crew of people she could rely on but didn’t have to and another day to relax before she went out to save the woods again.

Or it was _supposed_ to be easy, until Ronnie called her at nine o’clock in the morning. Stevie wasn’t used to 24-hour time, reverted when she wasn’t working. “I need your help with something,” Ronnie said.

“Um,” Stevie said, still not really awake, her mouth sandpaper-dry, “okay? What?”

“My car’s fucked up and I need a part,” Ronnie said. “Thought you might like to see Oregon.”

Stevie snorted. “I’ll drive you, but don’t make it sound like you’re doing me a favor.”

Ronnie chuckled on the other end of the line. “I’ll buy you lunch,” she said. “And I will have a travel mug of coffee when you get here.”

“I take it black,” Stevie said. “I’ll be ten minutes.”

She was at Ronnie’s, dressed and with her teeth brushed and a stack of granola bars in the cupholder, in eight. She wasn’t hung over enough to worry that she might throw up in her car; she _was_ hung over enough to roll her eyes when Ronnie grimaced at her face.

“Obviously you’re desperate,” Stevie said, “or you wouldn’t have called me.” Ronnie handed over the coffee and lifted the CD case from the seat. “You can DJ,” Stevie said, gesturing to it. “So why _didn’t_ you call somebody else?”

Ronnie glared at her, but morning-after Stevie was immune. “Karen got the friends in the divorce,” she said. “Think I might move when the season’s over. Oregon isn’t doing me any favors. Go toward I-5 and head north. I called everywhere nearby, but we can’t get the part closer than Portland.” She opened up the CD case and perused. “You listen to anything besides sad British rock boys?”

“There’s a couple sad American pop girls.” 

“Mm, that is... _half_ a step up.” Ronnie turned on the radio. They commented on place names until the landscape around them was built instead of green, and then Stevie needed directions, even though she wasn’t going to need to follow them for miles. Ronnie directed her to some junkyard off a four-lane road with more chain-link fence along it than not, where she bought the part. Then she told Stevie to move over and let her drive.

“Excuse me?” Stevie said.

“I know where we’re going. What, you think I’m a bad driver?”

“I’ve never _seen_ you drive!” But she got out.

Ronnie drove her to a place where there were some restaurants, but also there was a music store. “Too early for lunch,” Ronnie said, though Stevie, who’d only eaten one of her breakfast granola bars, couldn’t agree. “And you need some music in your car that’s worth listening to.”

Stevie could have objected to this dig at her taste, but after the drive across the country, she was perfectly willing to try something new. She followed Ronnie, though; she didn’t have the energy to make choices herself. Ronnie handed her a Tracy Chapman CD; Stevie couldn’t object. Eva Cassidy. “You’re trying to put me to sleep,” Stevie said. Nothing wrong with Eva Cassidy, but she didn’t really feel like car music. Brandi Carlisle; Stevie didn’t really know her. Joan Armatrading. They were working backward through the alphabet. “So, what,” Stevie said, following Ronnie into another aisle, “am I just buying whatever music you want?” Ronnie wordlessly handed her two Sade albums and a Tina Turner. That was a yes, then, probably? In another aisle, Ronnie stopped, frowned. Held up a Fleetwood Mac album. Stevie wasn’t going to take that one.

“You a fan?” Ronnie asked. “I mean, your name. Someone was a fan.”

“I didn’t name _myself_ ,” Stevie said.

“All right then,” Ronnie said. “No Fleetwood Mac.”

“You know,” Stevie said conversationally, because if Ronnie felt bad for her she might buy the music herself, but also because why not tell her, when they would be together this summer and never again, “when I was—I don’t know, two? _I_ don’t remember—my mom left to follow Fleetwood Mac. Never really came back for more than a couple weeks.”

“Damn,” said Ronnie. “Who raised you, your dad?”

“My great-aunt Maureen, actually,” Stevie said. “Grudgingly.”

Ronnie shook her head and took the CDs from Stevie’s hand up to the register. The person behind the counter looked between the two of them as though trying to figure out how they went together. _Aunt?_ A couple blocks down they got burritos, huge ones, Stevie was always starving now. Her body had become demanding, but the things it wanted were simple, possible when she wasn’t constrained by work. A burrito would do. On the way back to the car they stopped at a pastry store like something out of a painting, all fancy things she’d never seen before in a lit case. Stevie resisted the urge to get a brownie and instead pointed at something cube-shaped and chocolate-looking. It was—kind of weird, honestly. Ronnie wasn’t hard to talk to, and she _had_ dragged Stevie out of bed, but she didn’t have to make up for it with a day from a romcom. “Are you going to stay in Molalla?” she asked when they got in the car; it wasn’t really a fancy-pastry discussion. The country was huge, in a way she’d known before but not understood. And while a weirdly large amount of it was Nebraska, it also had forests where most of the trees wouldn’t change in fall, and rivers where people windsurfed, apparently, and fancy French bakeries where the pastries had so many layers she couldn’t tell them apart and had to understand them as a single stacked thing. She didn’t know how you found your one home in the middle of all of that.

“I’m not sure,” Ronnie said. She didn’t say it like a brushoff. “I have a brother in Texas. Wouldn’t be so gray down there. But I’ve been thinking about Philadelphia.”

“Why Philadelphia?”

Ronnie shrugged. “Just seems like a place that people really love.”

“Landslide” came on the radio then—they’d been too busy navigating out of the city and chatting to put in something they’d bought. But when the song started, Ronnie wordlessly opened the top CD case and slid in Sade.

“And you’d, what,” Stevie said, grateful but eager to get past the moment, “you’d start from scratch?”

“Gonna be doing that no matter where. But people eat chocolate there too.” At Stevie’s look, she said, “That’s what I used to do in the off season. Karen runs a chocolate store. Their big holidays are in the winter, y’know, in the chocolate business. Not like I have to go back to that, but I could.” 

Stevie made an  _ mm _ kind of listening noise.

Ronnie crossed her legs in the car seat. “Kind of refreshing to talk to you,” she said. “All the people who knew me before have  _ expectations _ .”

She probably shouldn’t ask, but she was curious now: “What do they expect?” But she didn’t get an answer.

The fire was bigger this time, and they were working on a blackline. Someone was finding places where the wind was in their favor, places where the trees were thinner, and they were digging a narrow hand line and burning inward.

Stevie was familiar with controlled burns in concept. She understood that the height of the flames here made digging an effective line impossible without a bulldozer. There were more handcrews here than she’d ever seen at one camp. And this was the first fire she’d worked on that was also being fought by helicopters carrying water and planes dropping flame retardants; controlled burns were another tool in the arsenal. But it made her nervous, still, the idea of trying to create a fire that would be safe but still a match for the one currently devastating the mountain. 

Ronnie saw she was twitchy. “You know,” she said, “lodgepole pinecones need fire to open. I mean, not saying we should burn down the Cascades just for the pinecones, but. A little fire helps the forest. Not to mention the space it clears for undergrowth.”

“I know,” Stevie said, though she hadn’t known that about the pinecones specifically. And she did it, with her team, cleared space for fire and started fire and monitored fire, all to get the fire to stop.

On the eighth night, Stevie got spiked out with Ken and Bob to keep an eye on things. She knew the occasional 24-hour shift was part of the job; she’d get paid for it. And hell, they’d all had plenty of nights with only a couple hours’ sleep on other fires, and they’d made it this long before they had to take their turn on this one. But Ken was a ways off, too far to talk to without shouting, and her throat was scraped from smoke. When Bob came by with updates,  _ he _ wanted to chat, but the man was such a bummer that she found herself reminding him he needed to go tell Ken. She ran out of granola bars, which was a real fucking crisis, since it left her without any task at all. This wasn’t like the difficult work of their days; she was just waiting for something terrible to happen, constantly on edge, required to maintain full awareness of her surroundings but without acting. And then, what, she would go right into tomorrow’s work, and she’d pay perfect attention to where she set her feet and to the potential hazards of falling branches and rolling logs and the familiar tension in the back of her neck would never, never relax. She’d always hated, at the motel, how her work mattered so little that she could sit at the desk completely inattentive to it. But here, now, she understood how the attention could be so important, so hard-won, that even with your family you’d become unable to turn it off.

Also, she was hungry. Also, she was sleepy. Her body was an empty drum, and the night beat it harder and harder. Good thing she didn’t join the fucking Coast Guard, she thought.

And then headlamps appeared on the path off to the east, and chattering. Not Ken and Bob, who were still in their positions, and she wouldn’t be able to see their faces under the headlamps, but one of the voices was Ronnie. The other—Jake, she thought. It didn’t matter. “Budd,” she called, “go rest. Roland’s waiting for you.”

“What?” Stevie was having trouble catching up. No one was supposed to be here—how had Roland even been persuaded out of bed? It couldn’t be morning yet. Midsummer and it was still dark.

“If I told you what I threatened him with, I’d have to kill you,” Ronnie said. Jake had gone up ahead, and now Ken was walking back towards her. “You won’t get all that much sleep, but it’s better than nothing.”

“Thanks, Ronnie,” Ken said fervently, and Stevie too, she’d never been as grateful to anyone as she was now to Ronnie and Jake, and she and Ken hiked off the line as fast as they ever had. She didn’t know whether this was allowed—she’d never heard of it happening before. Maybe she’d just fall asleep in the truck, she thought, miss the briefing in the morning and stay asleep until they got to the line again. But Roland, who didn’t seem to mind at all that it was zero o’clock in the morning, was chatty enough to make that impossible. She didn’t understand exactly why Ronnie would give up the sleep; Stevie had persisted in pitching her tent near Ronnie’s, so she knew it wasn’t her habit. Maybe she thought Stevie couldn’t take a whole night. Maybe she hadn’t been sleeping. It didn’t matter; back at the camp, she set her alarm, and she slept for nearly two whole hours.

The next 48-hour mandatory rest period, Stevie mostly rested and enjoyed being basically alone.Sure, Mutt showed up once or twice, but they reliably, as though by mutual agreement, never chatted. They might have gotten along as kids, if they’d tried. But probably not; Stevie had been the kind of child, and certainly the kind of teen, who believed the best defense was a good offense, and defense had been her constant state. Here she was too worn out from fighting fire to get into fights with her team, but back home, his preternatural calm had, on the few occasions they’d interacted, made her want to rile him. 

At work, she trusted him. He was the last person on the line, the one who told them when they were working too hard or not hard enough, who deemed their work sufficient. If they’d known each other here first, they might have gotten along as adults.

After another two-week roll, a hard one, with ash in her lungs and the fucked-up moonscape of a fire’s aftermath around her, Stevie was informed by Ronnie that they would be traveling to the coast.

They were still in the van on the way back to the ranger station. “Shouldn’t we be resting?” Stevie asked. The closest parts of the coast were maybe two hours’ drive away. Hardly a brief jaunt, though she was starting to get that people treated time and distance differently here. 

Sure enough, “It’s just a couple hours to get there,” Ronnie said. “And I’ll drive, obviously. We’ll go to Neskowin. Nothing there but a beach and hotels. It’ll be restful as fuck.”

“Okay, um,” Stevie said, “why?”

What she meant was  _ why do you want to do this with  _ me _? _ not  _ why go to the beach? _ But Ronnie scoffed and said, “You can’t come to Oregon and not see the coast.”

“Okay?”

“And I have a friend who’s out of town. We can stay at her place. We’ll get groceries on the way.”

“You’ve really thought this through, huh?”

“Go home and shower, pack a couple changes of clothes,” Ronnie said. “You can sleep in the car.”

They were doing this  _ tonight _ then. “I didn’t bring a swimsuit with me,” Stevie said.

Ronnie raised her eyebrows. “So?”

“Um, we’re going to the beach?”

Ronnie cackled. “You want to get in that water, you can do it by yourself. Just remember, if you find yourself in a rip tide, swim  _ across _ it, not  _ against _ it.”

“No swimming,” Stevie said. “Check.”

“It’s not like it’s  _ against the rules _ ,” Ronnie said. “It’s just too fucking cold.”

After she showered, Stevie sat on the front porch regretting her choice to do anything that might delay her ability to go to bed. It wasn’t late, really; they’d only worked twelve hours that day, like Bob could see they were all flagging. In other circumstances, Stevie wouldn’t be going to bed for a long time yet. But damn, she was going to get in a car and drive to the coast now?

Ronnie showed up a few minutes later, and she was radiating an aura of freshly-washed newly-moisturized togetherness when Stevie got in the car. Maybe years of practice developed the skill of cleaning all that smoke off efficiently. Or maybe it was just an upside to having very short hair.

There was already music playing when Stevie got in the car—of course Ronnie wouldn’t be one to hand off that control. But she looked—excited,  _ pleased _ , in a way Stevie had rarely seen from her. 

“You come out here a lot?”

“Once or twice a summer,” Ronnie said. “Sometimes a longer visit in the off season. It’s nice to get away.”

This was going to be a presumptuous question, but Ronnie was in a good mood, so—“The friend who lives there must be  _ your _ friend, not your ex’s?”

“Yeah, yeah, she used to live in town, but that was before Karen moved here.”

“You must be close, if she lets you have a set of keys.”

“There are like three people who live in all of Neskowin. She doesn’t lock her doors.”

Stevie was from a small town, knew people who made that kind of choice, but she didn’t  _ get _ it. The assumption of safety. Foreign concept to her. “Does she know we’re coming?”

Ronnie glanced over and laughed, a full-on out-loud laugh. “You should see your face,” she said. “She knows. It was her idea. When I told her about you.”

“Oh, well,” Stevie said, “always love to have people... _ talking _ about me.”

Ronnie rolled her eyes. “Don’t get a big head.” 

It wasn’t yet dark out; the summer. They got onto the freeway but then off of it a few minutes later. Often more fields than trees, over here, not like the mountains. Signs for vineyards. Ronnie had told her about the wine. She didn’t make Stevie talk to her; it was easy, just looking out the window and Ronnie there, driving. Like the summer Aunt Maureen had been the only person available to care for Nana Budd, the summer they’d driven back and forth, Stevie in the passenger’s seat, too young to be asked to do her share of the driving. Except that Ronnie was happy, as relaxed as Stevie had ever seen her. When they stopped for groceries, Ronnie chose two kinds of ice cream and three kinds of cookies, and she paid for everything as though that was a given, though Stevie hadn’t realized it would be.

The town was really almost nothing; when they came into it, Ronnie rolled down the windows and breathed like the air had changed. All Stevie could tell was that it wasn’t smoke. Ronnie drove to the house with no second-guessing and invited her right in. It really was empty—Stevie had been wary, perplexed at the idea of just walking into a stranger’s house, but Ronnie was dropping a bag in one bedroom and gesturing to the other for Stevie, unloading their two days’ food, holding up the ice creams for Stevie to choose, opening the silverware drawer and the cabinet with the bowls easily, on her first try, because she knew where everything belonged. She opened all the windows in the house with a bowl of ice cream in one hand—she’d offered one to Stevie, too—and leaned back contentedly onto the couch. So Stevie, too, sat, and ate ice cream, and it was like she imagined it must feel to be on vacation.

In the morning they went for a walk on the beach, beside the ocean, which—Stevie was familiar with the concept, all right, she’d seen movies. She’d been to school, knew the Pacific was basically a third of the surface of the earth. But she hadn’t imagined you’d be able to feel that when you stood beside it, the vastness, its enormous indifference.

Ronnie grinned sideways at her, like she knew. Stevie tried to play it cool, but also,  _ why? _ There was nothing wrong with being awed; it would satisfy Ronnie, if nothing else. They walked until they were hungry on the firmer, wetter sand. Stevie hadn’t brought a flannel out with her, not in daytime, and she shivered in her T-shirt and shorts, but she didn’t mind. She wanted to come back here, she wanted to be  _ able _ to come back here, she wanted never to leave, and she reveled in the sensation of wishing for something other than escape. “So are you just—used to this?”

“Oh, no,” Ronnie said, “no, it’s always like that.”

Back at the house, they ate avocados with spoons, and Stevie napped. She could hear Ronnie moving in the kitchen, but it didn’t bother her. Some people lived all the time like this, with people they trusted. Stevie was as calm as she could remember feeling. In the afternoon they walked on the beach again because, well. Later Ronnie cooked some clams, which Stevie had never eaten and was not sure about, but the food she’d had from Ronnie had been good so far, so she could try this. Stevie, being culinarily useless, streamed some of the music Ronnie liked and made sure her wine glass was never empty. And clams, yes—it turned out clams were a definite go, and before long they had empty plates and a bowl full of shells between them and they were laughing, which was mostly the wine.

Then these things happened, one right after the other: a bird flew into the back door with a loud thunk; Ronnie dropped immediately under the table; Stevie started to laugh. But Ronnie didn’t get up sheepishly, rolling her eyes at her own overreaction, so maybe it wasn’t funny. 

Stevie slid her chair back and reached out a hand.

“Was that a bird?” Ronnie said, not yet moving to get up.

“Yeah, but it’s not lying dead outside the door, so I think we’re all right.”

Ronnie frowned at Stevie’s hand, but then she took it and sat back at the table. Her hand was shaking when she set it on the napkin. “This is why I’m divorced,” she said wryly.

Stevie didn’t know where the line fell between natural interest and prying, with Ronnie. “Really?” she said, trying for casual, not too surprised or intrigued.

Ronnie shook her head, but it wasn’t a no. “In the woods it helps. It’s less cute at dinnertime.”

And this was Ronnie on an evening of wine; Stevie poured her the rest of what was left in their second bottle. “Would you,” she said—“if you were me, would you come back another season?”

Ronnie sighed. “You have a couple months left,” she said. “I can’t say what you should do. But if you get to the end of the summer and you can imagine not coming back? Don’t come back.”

Stevie nodded. She’d heard Ronnie talk about her fucked-up knees, her sore back. She shouldn’t ask it, but the wine and the scare... “What about you?” she said.

Ronnie shook her head, rolled her eyes. “ _ I _ don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t exactly plan to be this free.”

It was all Stevie had ever planned, but she hadn’t realized it was going to feel like this--like the ocean had beside them, vast and unconcerned. She downed the rest of her wine. “Same,” she said. She went to the fridge and brought back the fudge mint ice cream and two spoons and two bowls. It was too hard to scoop yet, so she waited. They had another night here, most of another day, to acclimate themselves to the calm.

The season started to wear on Stevie. It got so she was never not sore--however long it would take her body to recover, they never had that long off. It got so Mutt’s neighbors’ lawn mowers would wake her in the mild panic that a branch was about to fall. It got so she was angrier than an eyeroll when some teen burned down a forest with fireworks, and she was counting down to the end of October. The adrenaline rush hadn’t left, but the job had settled into her alongside it. She spent less and less of her time off doing anything but sleeping. 

She ought to be thinking about after, but she didn’t need a plan right away, and it was still too hard to conceive of. She’d have the whole summer’s pay, and she’d lived for free, not even bought most of her food. That, the practical opportunity of it, was easier to wrap her head around than the reality that she was going to make it to the future and she was going to have to live there. She wanted to ask Ronnie,  _ what do people do after this? _ but she’d come close to that already, and it was clear Ronnie didn’t have any neat answers. So she kept breathing smoke, forcing her body to comply. She wouldn’t be back here next summer. She didn’t need to hurt herself like this again. She’d already proven she could take it.

The fires were a bit farther between now, and while some crews were sent out on fire prevention rolls, Stevie’s was kept on call in case of actual danger. Ronnie invited her for dinner one night when they’d been in Molalla for four days. The farmer’s market had been that morning, and Ronnie did this grimace about how she’d gotten too enthusiastic, and now she had to eat all this before they were called back out. Stevie was happy to be fed. She went over with wine and helped with the easy, rote tasks, shucking the corn and breaking the ends off the green beans. She wanted to keep living in Ronnie’s glow, but summer was the sort of thing that ended. “I think I’m going to stay in Oregon,” she said into the colander. “I don’t want another long road trip.”

Ronnie nodded approvingly. “I think I’m getting the hell out,” she said.

Stevie nodded at the green beans. “I’ll miss you,” she said. She’d planned for a lot of things before she came out here, but not for the intimacy that months of shared danger would foster. She wasn’t sure she’d expected anything good, actually, except that she’d be far away and too tired to look back. What an absolute failure of imagination, she thought now. But in her experience, the kind of people who imagined good things would happen to them had some precedent that made them think it.

“Weirdly enough,” said Ronnie, “I might miss you too.”

“I used to work in a motel,” said Stevie. “You think your friend on the coast knows any hotels that need more front desk staff?”

“You want to go back to that?” Ronnie was kind enough not to point out that they were into the slow season by now.

“It doesn’t have to be forever,” Stevie said. “I can always leave.”

She handed over the colander of green beans and tossed their discarded ends into the trash. 

While Ronnie’s back was turned, she said, “I couldn’t have done it without you. This summer.” 

Ronnie turned around and looked her over. “You could have. It just would’ve been worse.”

Ronnie lost her first burst of adrenaline earlier in a roll than most of the guys; Stevie had come to expect it on day three. And partway through mop-up on this day three, Stevie came upon her struggling with a log. It wasn’t a big one, and Ronnie had already waved off Jake’s offer of help. Stevie grabbed the other end of it anyway.

“What are you doing?” Ronnie said skeptically, though she lifted her end and moved it where she wanted it to go.

Carefully dropping the log, Stevie shook her head. “Just trying to put out a fire.”

Once their jobs were officially over, Stevie just spent two nights at Mutt’s. Patrick’s boyfriend had a connection at an inn in Garibaldi, and she’d be able to crash with Patrick in Tillamook before the interview. Ronnie had made a face, but she liked the boyfriend well enough. 

The full day in between was spent getting all Ronnie’s shit from her house into Mutt’s barn, which was indeed an actual barn. She was going to head east; she’d visit her brother first. It was pretty nice inside, and Ronnie didn’t seem to worry about all her things getting wet, though she did cover her mattress in sheet plastic. It was heavy work, the moving, but they were used to heavy work. Ronnie spent that night in Mutt’s bedroom, Mutt still in the barn. She had her clothes and her windowsill rosemary and whatever else in her car. Stevie got them barbecue from Smokey Bones and they ate it on a blanket on the dead front lawn, lazily. She wasn’t so constantly ravenous since work had slowed down. She was lucky to spend time with her like this, the way that people spent time with their families.

“How will you know when it’s the right place?” Stevie asked her.

Ronnie snorted. “When I’m tired of driving,” she said.

Stevie snorted too.

“Or when someone picks me up in a bar and I realize I want a second date.”

“You’re trying to make yourself sound impulsive.”

“At some point,” said Ronnie, “I’ll have to make the call.”

Stevie didn’t have anything to offer her for the trip, which seemed horribly inadequate. Not that that was a coworker’s obligation, but for Ronnie? Stevie owed her. She made her a joking spotify playlist of sad British rock boys and sent her off with a hug. “Tell me where you end up,” she said, and she hoped it didn’t sound as desperate to Ronnie as it did to her. 

“Come on,” Ronnie said, “you’re going to have to text me all the time to keep me up on the gossip.”

There wasn’t that much gossip, and Stevie figured after a couple weeks apart, there’d be even less. So it was a kind thing to say, and she agreed she would.

Ronnie texted her photos, though. She went to the Alamo; Stevie sent back a tide pool. She didn’t want Ronnie to have a lonely road trip; she didn’t want Ronnie to think there was nothing to come back to. But, “Don’t worry about me,” she texted from Philadelphia. “I’ve got a second date with a florist and nowhere else I have to be.”

**Author's Note:**

> I have a weird bookmarks folder of wildland firefighting information now. I am going to share some of them because idk some of them are fun.
> 
> [here is a video of various firefighters explaining how to sharpen various tools, mostly](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TrehiITIYM)
> 
> [here's a random story about a firefighter](https://grow.acorns.com/what-its-really-like-to-be-a-wildland-firefighter-in-montana/) and [some other people talking about their firefighting lives](https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112440766)
> 
> [and a glossary](https://www.fs.fed.us/nwacfire/home/terminology.html)
> 
> ok my folder is actually really big but you do not need all of them lol


End file.
